Almost every single “Mission: Impossible” film is longer than last. The one exception is “Rogue Nation,” which comes in a mere two minutes shorter than its predecessor “Ghost Protocol.” Some will surely see the inflating runtimes as a sign of indulgence, which is unavoidable (especially with someone with as much power as Tom Cruise). It doesn’t help the optics that the 163-minute “Mission: Impossible โ Dead Reckoning Part One” is just the first half of a story.
It makes sense why the runtimes get increasingly longer over time. The action set pieces become more ambitious. The plots become all the more intricate and convoluted. The ensemble continues to expand. What is remarkable about the movies getting bigger, though, is that they are able to maintain a level of quality unparalleled in the modern Hollywood franchise machine. In fact, most of the time, each film is better than the previous one. That basically never happens.
People always like to think they like their movies shorter, as if watching a movie is somehow an obligation and that a long movie couldn’t justify its own length. But that isn’t really what they want. They want movies that are well-paced. A movie should be however long it needs to be, and regarding the “Mission: Impossible” films, no one understands that better than writer/director Christopher McQuarrie and star/producer Tom Cruise. Even though the movies they’ve made are the longest in the series, that doesn’t mean they aren’t incredibly judicious about what ends up in the final cut.
Killing your babies
There’s an expression in art called “killing your babies,” or “killing your darlings.” This refers to the practice of cutting scenes, lines, or moments that the creator personally loves that ultimately don’t serve the greater whole, be it a movie, TV show, album, or even a comedy sketch. /Film’s Jeremy Mathai recently spoke with “Mission: Impossible” star Simon Pegg about stuff he loved in the movies that ultimately didn’t make the final cut of the films, such as a border crossing scene into Kashmir in “Fallout” that was teased in the trailers. It was a tense scene that was tough to shoot, but Pegg understood that “in the end, it just slowed the story down. So we cut it out.”
As he’s a terrific writer himself, Pegg completely understands that killing these babies helps the film as a whole. Being precious about your material only serves your ego and not your art. He goes on to say:
“I never regret that stuff because I know it’s for the greater good. You’ve got to make the film sing. And for Tom and McQ, I asked them when we were shooting, I said, ‘How long is the film going to be?’ And they both said, ‘As long as it’s entertaining.’ And I just thought, ‘Well, that’s the perfect answer.’ I’ve seen 86-minute movies that felt longer than ‘Mission: Impossible.'”
And Pegg couldn’t be more correct. I look at the list of my least favorite films of the year thus far, and four of the bottom six are 100 minutes or less compared to just two that are over two hours. Meanwhile, “Dead Reckoning Part One” is 163 minutes and in my top five. The key to a great movie length isn’t the length itself. It’s how you utilize that time.